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Democratic Leaders are a Craven Bunch of Idiots Bent on Self-Destruction

March 3, 2017 - 8:51am  lindorff

Paving the way for a new progressive party?

by:

Dave Lindorff

And then there’s the corrupt and self-destructive selection of former Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez as the Democratic National Committee chair, replacing the corrupt Donna Brazile, who helped screw candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders out of the party’s nomination by, among other things, passing Hillary Clinton tips about questions CNN planned to ask in her primary debate with Sanders, before herself being chosen by the DNC to replace the disgraced prior chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (forced to resign at the start of last year’s Democratic Convention because of emails exposing her role in skewing the primaries in Hillary Clinton’s favor). Perez steamrolled Sanders’ popular choice for chair, Rep. Keith Ellison thanks to the votes of big corporate donors who, under a deeply corrupt policy of the DNC, get to be DNC members along with top state party officials and major Democratic elected leaders. The ramming through of the Perez selection as party chairman was a big stick thrust in the eye of the increasingly large progressive wing of the Democratic Party base, and that insult will cost the party incalculable support going forward.

Want more stupid? Despite talk of “resistance,” and impassioned calls from progressive organizations for Senate Democrats as a bloc to reject Trump’s “deconstruction” cabinet of nominees whose goal is to wreck their government departments and agencies they head, many of the party’s senators have been supporting outrageous Trump nominees for his cabinet. Mike Pompeo, a Tea Party Republican who likes torture and is an outspoken Islamaphobe, got 14 votes from the Senate Democratic Caucus for the post of CIA director. John Kelly, a retired Marine general who has said he’s okay with targeting Muslims for special surveillance, got the support of 36 Democratic Senators for the post of Secretary of Homeland Security. Elaine Chao, George W. Bush’s labor secretary, wife of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and no friend or working people, got 41 Democratic Senators’ votes for Commerce Secretary. And then there’s Nikki Haley, the Russophobic governor of South Carolina, whose nomination received 44 Democratic votes, and the Cold Warrior “Mad Dog” Mattis, the Marine general who picked up a whopping 46 votes for Secretary of Defense. Even the new “Secretary of Exxon” Rex Tillerson, the human incarnation of Big Oil, managed to snag four Democratic votes supporting his nomination.

This is supposed to be an opposition party? A party of “resistance” to Trumpism? It’s sure hard to see it. Especially as it’s clear that Judge Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee to replace the mercifully expired Constitutional Luddite Justice Antonin Scalia, and a jurist of at least equally right-wing views, will receive plenty of votes from Democratic Senators, handing back to Republicans a five-vote majority on the High Court after they stonewalled for a year on Obama’s nominee for the vacant seat, not even granting him a hearing by the Senate Judicial Committee.

But surely the stupidest of all the Democratic leadership policies in this year of crisis, as President Trump and the Republicans in Congress seek to undo not just what few significant progressive actions were taken during eight years of the Obama administration, but even what’s left of the New Deal legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has been the craven, pathetic and self-defeating effort to avoid accepting the blame for Trump’s November victory.

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